Tuesday, January 31, 2012

It’s hard to know who is the more ridiculous figure — the grandiloquent,
bombastic and compulsively dishonest Gingrich, or the beguilingly
ignorant Cain, a man who has never held elective office and who was
reduced to speechlessness when asked a question about Libya.
Nonetheless, Gingrich, his Alfred E. Neuman grin on his face, accepted
the endorsement and then went on with his nihilistic campaign for the
White House. This has been an exceedingly silly political season.

In fact, the Republicans have become the silly party, precisely because they cannot accept the concept of nuance:

If you ask me what I think of abortion, I’d say, “It depends.” It
depends on whether you’re talking about the ninth month of pregnancy,
the first, the health of the mother, the fetus — or, even, the
morning-after pill. But in the Republican contest, the answer to the
question is always the same: no, no and no again. Thanks for giving the matter such careful thought.

It
is the same with taxes. Should they be raised? It depends. It depends
on economic and fiscal conditions — and on whose taxes will be raised
and by how much. The answer cannot be “No, never.” That’s not an economic position; it is an ideological one and exhibits a closed mind.

And so it is with all issues -- global warming, the Iranian nuclear problem, relations with China. The answers are all simple. The problem is that the world isn't. And the Republican Establishment -- if it still exists -- has not had the courage to bring this to the party's the attention. For too long, Cohen writes, the movers and shakers in the party have

been mute in the face of a belligerent anti-intellectualism, pretending
that knowledge and experience do not matter and that Washington is a
condition and not a mere city.

Now, 17 years later, I'm intrigued by how fear has been largely replaced
by anger. When we cast around looking for where the cuts are coming, we
look at where the government and its allies have been trying to whip
up scorn and rage: the CBC, the public service, generous pensions,
unions, provinces, (certain) foreigners, and pretty much anyone who is
seen to be standing in the way of Conservative dreams of prosperity.

The same scenario is being played out south of the border by Newt Gingrich. He gives voice to angry white men who like to think that they are undeprivileged. But its clear that the money which backs Gingrich does not come from Mom and Pop. The privileged -- particularly Sheldon Adelson -- are intent on keeping their privileges.

And so it is with Stephen Harper. He speaks for -- and whips up the anger of -- those who have benefited from the very policies which almost sent us over the cliff in 2008. When he speaks of "transformation," he speaks for more of the same -- the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. Anyone who opposes his vision is "an enemy of Canada."

It's strange that the man who claims he is the friend of the private sector and who last held a private sector job as a teenager -- which he obtained by relying on his father's connections -- should resort to a strategy which would never work in the private sector. Delacourt writes:

It's interesting -- this is something that probably couldn't work in the
private sector. (And probably shouldn't.) When downsizing cuts are made
in this realm, our bosses have to go to some lengths to prove that the
job losses weren't the result of a grudge or personal antipathy. Funny
how when it comes to government, or at least this government, we simply
assume that those being cut are going to get cut down first in the eyes
of the public.

Harper, like Gingrich, is a demagogue. Bob Rae is right. They deserve each other.

Neither agency has been part of the government's review of spending. Yet Harper claims that -- while such zombie departments can be tolerated -- the Old Age Security program is "unsustainable." That claim, Tom Walkom writes in the Toronto Star, is pure Harperian balderdash:

True, the government predicts that the cost of pensions for the
elderly, now about $35.6 billion, will triple by 2030. That sounds dire.
In fact it means that the pension bill will grow by about 5.6 per cent a
year during the period.

And when baby boomers start to die off, as they will from about 2020,
spending on the elderly will start to decelerate on its own.

Harper claims that he is merely saving Canada from the kinds of problems which Europe is facing. But his diagnosis of the cause of those problems -- an out of control welfare state -- is simply wrong. Walkom writes:

In fact, the European debt crisis is far more complex. Spain and
Ireland, which do not offer generous social programs, are in trouble.
Germany, which does, is not.

Arguably, the real root cause of the crisis was the decision by
countries with vastly different economies to use a common currency, the
euro — a decision that encouraged too much public and private borrowing
during the good times and makes repayment now near impossible.

The truth is that Stephen Harper will cut what he doesn't like -- not what doesn't work. The man who insists he's the smartest guy in the room is really not a very bright fellow. Still, he has proved in the past that he has a talent for seizing expediency.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

It is hard to decide what is more astonishing: Prime Minister Stephen
Harper's inconsistencies and course corrections, or the fact they have
done no serious damage to his standing in the polls.

For a man who claims to offer no surprises, Stephen Harper has been remarkably inconsistent:

He accused critics of wanting to "cut and run" in Afghanistan, but,
after nearly a decade of futile struggle, conceded the war was
unwinnable and began withdrawing Canadian forces. He was never going to
downplay China's human rights abuses in the name of the "almighty
dollar" - until it became useful, recently, to ardently court China as a
customer for tarsands oil.

There were other surprises:
Mulroney-style Senate appointments, the unsavoury Chuck Cadman affair,
the creative use of G8 funding to help Tony Clement secure re-election,
the inexcusable defence of an EI watchdog agency that has done no work,
has no immediate work to do, yet has already cost the treasury $3.3
million, with no end in sight.

And then there was that promise to be accountable to Canadians, which certainly didn't square with the government's concerted attempt to destroy information -- as in the case of the long gun registry or the long census form -- or simply attempting to keep information under wraps -- as in the case of documents relating to the treatment of Afghan prisoners.

In the end, Riley wrote, Stephen Harper's lack of charisma has put many Canadians to sleep, while others have simply given up:

They turn their back on politics, don't bother to vote, even imagine it is fashionable to remain aloof.

They claim all politicians are the same, but they aren't. They claim it doesn't matter which party holds power, but it does.

If Occupiers had simply voted en masse in May, we wouldn't have a majority Conservative government today.

Stephen Harper is firmly ensconced in Ottawa and now lectures Canadians and Europeans on how they should run their economies -- even though the decisions which benefited Canada were made by others.

And he does so, even though a clear majority of Canadians didn't vote for him. As long as that majority remains divided, they will make it easy for Stephen Harper to succeed.

The growth in the number of information officers is curious. For the Harper government has been all about releasing less information, not more of it. The truth is that the Conservatives are obsessed with information -- or more specifically, the control of information. Simpson writes:

Everyone with even the slightest acquaintance of this government knows
of its mania for information control. Although information officers have
grown in number throughout the government, all messaging (down to the
finest details) is controlled in the Prime Minister’s Office and the
Privy Council Office, where, predictably, the number of people working
on information has also grown.

Despite their emphasis on information control, however, the Harperites got their signals crossed. While Clement ensured his audience that neither Canada Pension nor Old Age Security payments would be cut, Harper was telling his audience in Davos that Old Age Security was unsustainable. This is still the gang that can't shoot straight.

Nevertheless, at the World Economics Forum, Harper lectured European governments on their penchant for initiating services for which they refuse to pay. Strangely enough, the Europeans aren't buying what our prime minister says. They know what every Canadian should know by now: Stephen Harper is full of himself.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

This week's summit between First Nations chiefs and the Prime Minister played out according to Stephen Harper tightly scripted wishes. It was all pictures, good wishes and no substance. Harper works very hard to stage manage his appearances; and this summit was supremely stage managed. There was no mention of the fact that, six years ago, the prime minister tore up the Kelowna Accord.

• More than half of the First Nation population in Canada is under 23.
• The aboriginal birth rate is double that of many regions of Canada.• Sixty-one per cent of First
Nation adults aged 20-24 have not completed high school, compared with
13 per cent of non-aboriginal Canadians. • The unemployment rate for
First Nation peoples living on-reserve is 25 per cent, three times the
rate for non-aboriginal Canadians.

There is rebellion brewing. The government has been warned that an Aboriginal Spring is around the corner.

Years ago, I sat in on a meeting of African American kids from ghettos in the southern United States. It was 1969, a year after Martin Luther King's assassination, and American cities were burning. I was one of a group of white middle class kids who were getting a taste of what life was like for the kids we only saw on television.

One of us said to a young lady who was vocal, but not hostile, "There are 22 million of you and 180 million of the other guys -- and they have more guns than you do."

"I'd rather die standin' up," she said, "than on my knees."

If people get desperate enough, all hell can break lose. Mr. Harper is sitting on top of a volcano. The pictures from that eruption will not be carefully stage managed.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

impose severe legal restrictions on how much money citizens or
independent groups can spend on “political advertising” during federal
elections.

According to the law, “political advertising” includes any ads that
support or oppose a political party or candidate or which simply take a
stand on any issue that might be associated with any political party or
candidate.

In short, it’s a gag law that makes it virtually impossible for unions,
environmental groups, church organizations, taxpayer advocates or any
group or individual to effectively or freely express political opinions
at election time – the most crucial period of any democracy.

Nicholls' position is essentially a carbon copy of the argument made by Citizens United in the United States. That argument -- upheld by the Supreme Court -- is that money is the equivalent of free speech; and any attempt to limit the amount of money directed towards political advertising is an attempt to limit free speech.

You cannot watch the morning news shows in South Carolina without
confronting an intricately confusing blitz of ads, some paid for by
candidates, others by the supposedly independent PACs. One kind is
indistinguishable from the other.

Nicholls would turn Canadian airwaves into a northern version of those in the Palmetto State. For him, there is no question of fairness. He is not worried about what happens when those who have the most money possess the biggest megaphone:

The point is, the political consequences of the ad should be irrelevant.
Nor should it matter that the ad is negative. All that does matter is
that the NCC, and indeed all Canadians, should have the right to engage
in the political process through advertising, even if thin-skinned
politicians don’t like it.

Mr. Nicholls misses what has become the central problem in Canada and the United States: Money has corrupted our politics.

didn’t become a Republican until 1952, the year he
campaigned for the presidency. He had never been schooled on political
partisanship. “My only appeal to you,” he said during the campaign, “my
only appeal to America … is to place loyalty to the country above
loyalty to a political party.” He forbade his staff to issue personal
attacks against opponents. He was dismayed by the primal political
instincts of his vice-president, Richard Nixon.

In the end, Eisenhower did not have much praise for Nixon. When asked to name an important decision Nixon had participated in, Eisenhower responded, "If you give me a week I might think of one." Given what happened during Nixon's presidency, historians may one day write that Eisenhower's greatest contribution to his country was keeping Nixon away from the levers of power.

But, most importantly, Ike understood the limits of military power. He kept U.S. troops out of Suez and Vietnam. And he warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. The man who led the D-Day invasion told Americans:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the
genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way
of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it
is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Republicans have come a long way since Ike's day. One doubts that he would recognize his party, let alone vote for it. He'd probably call himself an independent -- which is what he was before he became president.

Monday, January 23, 2012

"Learning from experience," the American historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, "is a faculty almost never practised." The truth of that claim is readily apparent in Canada. In fact, Stephen Harper is the incarnation of Tuchman's axiom.

In a report for the Centre For Policy Alternatives, David MacDonald examines three possible scenarios for government belt tightening. Unlike the Liberals in the early nineties, who travelled the country explaining how their budget cuts were going to be administered, the Conservative budget cuts are shrouded in secrecy.

But regardless of which scenario the government finally decides to follow, MacDonald estimates that some 60,000 public and private sector jobs will be lost -- with Ottawa and the Atlantic provinces being hit the hardest:

“Depending on the scenario, the national capital region could be hit
hard — losing over 22,000 positions — followed by Atlantic Canada with
its already high unemployment.”

The Harperites are intent on cutting jobs as the Canadian economy shows signs of slowing. Austerity is the only way forward for the Conservatives, who are -- by Tuchman's definition -- the epitome of wooden headedness:

It consists [Tuchman wrote] in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions
while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according
to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

The Harperites have never based policy on facts. They have never started from the premise that you deal with the world as it is. They have always begun from their own ideal of the world as it should be. And, from their perspective, the world would be much better off with much less government. If that makes the world less fair, more violent, more poverty stricken -- well, that's the kind of collateral damage that people will have to live with.

When I was a child wooden headed puppets were very popular among the younger set. We called them dummies.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

The day before thousands of people gathered in London to support Electro-Motive's locked out workers, Jim Stanford wrote in the Globe and Mail that labour is facing a brave new world:

In the current bargaining environment, companies (especially
multinational firms) hold the best cards. And executives are
increasingly willing to precipitate their own work stoppages – through
management lockouts – to enforce demands for lower wages and benefits.

A recession -- particularly this one -- always puts management in the catbird seat. High unemployment gives workers few options. That's where government could play a crucial role. In 1935 -- in the middle of the Great Depression -- the Roosevelt administration passed the Wagner Act, which gave workers something they had never had before -- the right to organize. It also set up the National Labour Relations Board to act as a mediator in labour disputes.

The Harper government, of course, has gone in exactly the opposite direction -- as its response to both the Canada Post and Air Canada strikes makes crystal clear. And it has been absolutely silent about the situation at Electro-Motive. Selling oil is on its radar. Canadian manufacturing jobs aren't.

There is a clear agenda behind the government's response. And the results, writes Stanford, will not be good for the Canadian economy:

This trend is troubling, for macroeconomic as well as ethical reasons.
As employers ratchet down compensation, income shifts from consumers
(who spend every penny) to corporations (which sit on a growing pile of
uninvested cash). That undermines aggregate spending and weakens the
recovery. And the more employers succeed in driving down wages, the
greater the danger of setting off a cycle of deflation in wages and
prices (such as the one that bedevilled Japan for a decade).

The prime minister claims to be an economist. But that claim -- like so may of the other things he has said -- does not stand up to scrutiny.

It depends on one commodity and one country. The commodity is oil; the country is China.

Right now both are going gangbusters.
The Chinese economy surges along. That surge keeps the price of oil at
its current, near-stratospheric, level. This, in turn, makes oil
producers rich and keeps the rest of the Canadian economy above water.

Recent history should remind us all that what goes up can fall quickly to earth. The simple truth that what soars into the stratosphere -- like so much space junk -- eventually crashes.

The National Energy Board estimates that the price of crude oil, now
roughly $100 a barrel, will have to stay in at least the $90 range if
new tar sands projects are to be profitable. Yet no one worries.

The reigning assumption seems to be
that the price of oil will never, ever, significantly go down again —
that there will be no new technological advances that might allow
existing reserves to be exploited more efficiently.

Given history, it is a heroic assumption.

As for China's roaring economy, Canada needs only cast an eye towards its closest neighbour to take a cautionary lesson. Japan, too, provides all high flying countries with a warning:

Who can forget the Japanese miracle? It was the way of the future.
Just as Harper today makes pilgrimages to China, former prime minister
Brian Mulroney voyaged to Tokyo to see the new wonders and sell Canadian
energy.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Mitt Romney has so far refused to release information on his taxes. There is a good reason why he hasn't. If those documents see the light of day, it will become immediately apparent that Romney is a poster child for precisely what is wrong with the American economy.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has been releasing income and tax data for the
400 highest-income filers. In 2008, the most recent year available,
these filers paid only 18.1 percent of their income in federal income
taxes; in 2007, they paid only 16.6 percent. When you bear in mind that
the rich pay little either in payroll taxes or in state and local taxes —
major burdens on middle-class families — this implies that the top 400
filers faced lower taxes than many ordinary workers.

The main reason the rich pay so little is that most of their income
takes the form of capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 15
percent, far below the maximum on wages and salaries. So the question
is whether capital gains — three-quarters of which go to the top 1
percent of the income distribution — warrant such special treatment.

The problem with such special treatment is that it acts like a vacuum cleaner, sucking all the wealth to the top of the economic pyramid. The bottom eventually collapses, bringing down the whole house of cards -- and leaving in its wake the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

Some argue that special treatment of capital gains creates jobs. The argument that Romney's Republican opponents are making is that it destroys jobs, while creating profits for investors. But they can't have it both ways. And that is the bind they are in.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

When the Tea Party surged to the polls two years ago, some commentators saw a right wing populist movement taking control of the Republican Party. But E.J. Dionne writes this morning that the race for the Republican presidential nomination proves what has been the case for a long time -- big money is in the driver's seat:

The power of big money has been amplified in this campaign by the super PACs let loose by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and lax regulation.

You
cannot watch the morning news shows in South Carolina without
confronting an intricately confusing blitz of ads, some paid for by
candidates, others by the supposedly independent PACs. One kind is
indistinguishable from the other.

What is different about his year's campaign is that Republicans are breaking Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment : Never speak ill of a fellow Republican:

Rick Perry’s backers take on both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
Ron Paul assails Gingrich and Santorum, too. Romney’s supporters have
piled on with ads against Gingrich. Gingrich flicks aside
Santorum and Perry with faint praise in his speeches, as he did at an
event here on Tuesday night, maintaining that “the only effective vote
to stop Mitt Romney is Newt Gingrich.”

The end result is that the Republican Party in 2012 looks distinctly unsavoury. They seem bent on their own destruction. Unlike the man they idolize, none of the candidates project a sunny disposition. There is no Republican populist movement. It is no longer "Morning in America."

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Daniel Veniez argues that, under Stephen Harper, Ottawa has become a "passive investor" in the provinces. Harper's view of the Canadian Constitution is that of a Biblical fundamentalist -- the words in the BNA Act are immutable. The problem is that recent governments have paid too little attention to chapter and verse. He argues that, in 1867, John A. Macdonald and his associates favoured a highly decentralized federation.

Yet that is a curious argument. Veniez points out that:

The Fathers of Confederation designed a constitution where the federal
government was the lead government. Our first Prime Minister,
Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald, believed that a strong and dominant
national government was vital to developing a sense of shared nationhood.

Stephen Harper's Conservatives forget that Canada was born in the wake of the American Civil War. Macdonald was adamant that the kind of fracturing which had occured in the United States not occur here.

Harper lacks Macdoanld's national vision. In fact, his politics are closer to Alexander Mackenzie's than Macdoanld's. Mackenzie believed that a national railroad which crossed the Rockies was simply inefficient. He suggested that the route meet American railways further south and then turn north to Vancouver. Macdonald argued that the railway was about national unity, not just economic efficiency.

Canada's health care system is the 21st century equivalent of the CPR. To Stephen Harper, it is an accounting problem. There are consequences to Harper's view of Confederation. Veniez writes:

Strengthening the spinal cord of the nation requires leaders – in Ottawa
and the provinces – that believe this is important. The consequence of
ignoring the real power of a cohesive national action on various fronts
is a more fragmented and dispersed federation than ever before. One need
look no further than the skirmishes and cleavages on everything from
energy and climate change policy to health care, securities regulation
and immigration, just to name a few.

Stephen Harper would preside over the dissolution of Canada -- if it meant turning a profit.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

We all yearn for a modern day Cincinatus, who -- so the story goes -- left his quiet life on the farm to serve Rome. In truth, Cincinatus was a Roman aristocrat who, because of political reverses, had been exiled there until circumstances allowed him to return.

Lawrence Martin argues that political parties are at their best in the hands of career politicians, be they John A. Macdonald, Wilfred Laurier, Mackenzie King or Stephen Harper. It is for that reason, he writes in this morning's Globe and Mail, that the Liberal Party is in good hands:

What Liberals are encouraged about is not new policy but the fact that
the party is now in the hands of a seasoned political pro, one who has
demonstrated a surefootedness that has been absent under the three
previous leaders.

There are those who will strenuously disagree with Martin. Many of them are card carrying Liberals. But, for the present, it's hard to argue with Martin's assertion that:

For Liberals, the experience and professionalism Mr. Rae brings are what
is needed at this time. With an election four years away, policy can
wait. The one big issue he emphasized in his closing convention speech
was income inequality. He sees this as a good prong with which to attack
the Conservatives’ economic record.

The Conservatives assume that income inequality is a natural state of affairs.They do not see that it is their Achilles Heel. If Mr. Rae's political acumen can clear the way for a clear shot at such an obvious political weakness, the Liberals have a future.

Several commentators have opined that this weekend was a blast from the past. We shall see. Martin writes that:

The message from Bob Rae was that the Grits are and will remain the
non-ideological party, the party of the pragmatic centre where reason
allegedly triumphs over gut prejudices of the left or right.

If the new prime directive in Canadian politics is that gut prejudice trumps reason, then we are, indeed, in deep trouble. Those who operate on that principle should be exiled to their farms.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Successful nations are built on unifying infrastructure. Think railways and the Trans-Canada Highway, seamless telecommunications
networks, the armed forces, regulatory and judicial processes. Health
care is a level up in importance because health is a fundamental
precondition for full participation in society.

The last part of the last sentence bears repeating -- health is a fundamental precondition for full participation in society. It should be obvious by now that Conservative success depends on decreasing citizen participation. In every federal election in which Stephen Harper has run, voter participation has shrunk. The fewer citizens who vote, the more Stephen Harper will succeed. The Conservatives know this; and they work hard to make it so.

But Romanow and his confreres point to what should be another obvious fact -- Harper and Company, all claims to the contrary, are economically dense. Romanow and his associates insist that, "A high performing nationwide public health system contributes enormously to the economy."

Businesses don’t have to design and fund complex
health plans for their employees. Workers don’t have to worry that
taking a job in another province will compromise their health care. Only
leadership from Ottawa can guarantee a common set of programs and
standards and ensure that program enhancements are available to all
Canadians.

Now Mr. Harper proposes to wash his hands of medicare and simply write cheques. In his six years as prime minister, he has never held a first ministers conference. There are some who hail this "executive federalism" as the wave of the future. The truth is that a meeting would mean that Mr. Harper would have to face his opposition; and -- as he has proven in the past -- he would rather prorogue it than face it.

Perhaps that's because opposition rebuttals show up the prime minister for the shallow, shrivelled leader he is.

But over the years, frustrated public officials — a former auditor
general (1986), a researcher in the parliamentary library (2006) and
Canada’s parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page (last June) — have
disregarded this directive, seeking to provide Canadians with a rough
idea how much is going out the back door.

In that tradition, here is the value of all the tax expenditures in the 2011 report, released this week: $152 billion.

To put that in perspective, the government’s total program spending in 2011 amounted to $248 billion.

And, as anyone who has followed Stephen Harper's progress knows, the number of tax breaks has been growing. Goar enumerates some of them:

Yet, by accounting sleight of hand, none of those breaks show up as costs. It's an old trick. George W. Bush kept the cost of two wars off the books for eight years.

Those of us who remember Mr. Flaherty's tenure as Minister of Finance for Ontario know that he has great difficulty balancing the books. But, in truth, the call isn't his. It's Stephen Harper's. And Harper -- for more than a decade -- has been selling the notion that he is an economist.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Mitt Romney, whose reported net worth is somewhere north of $200 million, argues that he knows how to make all Americans wealthier. In what is perhaps the deepest irony of this presidential season, Newt Gingrich echoes William Jennings Bryan -- who declared, "No one can earn a million dollars honestly."

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation
needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact,
a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing
corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not,
in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve
economic recovery.

The solution to America's problems is not simply to increase corporate profits. That's a notion that those who have gained from globalization love to repeat. They have done well by slashing costs. However,

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting.
From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers),
the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost
side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in
the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all
of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case,
unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit
domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits
was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and
employment collapsed.

Romney succeeded because of a narrow focus on profits. Countries are about more than making profits. Krugman reminds his readers that the last two presidents who claimed to be businessmen -- George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover -- left shipwrecks behind them.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Lise St-Denis could easily have continued to collect her pay as the MP
for Saint-Maurice—Champlain on the NDP benches for the foreseeable
future. Battling cancer at 71, the retired teacher could have bided her
time before quietly going home. That would have been the path of least
resistance.

The truth is that -- having been abandoned by the Conservatives, mortified by the Liberals and isolated by the Bloc Quebecois -- Quebecers parked their votes with the New Democrats in the last election. True, Quebec politics have been left of center for a long time; and the NDP platform was a good fit. But more than anything else, Quebecers voted for Jack Layton.

Many Canadians had forgotten -- or simply did not know -- that, despite all his time on Toronto City Council, Jack Layton was a native son, who moved as effortlessly between French and English as Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney did before him.

On top of all that, St. Denis occupies Jean Chretien's old seat, which the old fox occupied -- except for a brief hiatus -- for nearly forty years. If she has had her ear to the ground, she knows that her constituents are not rock solid Dippers.

It's beginning to look like the Liberals and the New Democrats are preparing for an ugly battle in Quebec. That would be a mistake for both parties. Hebert correctly notes that:

The problem is that precious few Quebecers signed up for a fight to
the finish between the Liberals and the NDP or for a left-wing crusade
last May. More than a third of the party’s 2011 supporters voted for
Jean Chrétien in 2000. A significant number are poised to vote for the
new right-of-centre Coalition Avenir Québec in the next provincial
election.

It was Layton’s ecumenical approach
to politics that drew so many Quebec voters to the NDP. Based on his
2008 advocacy of a governing arrangement with the Liberals, he seemed
best placed to reach out of the partisan box and build a progressive
coalition sturdy enough to take on the Conservatives.

The next time around, both parties would do well to follow Nathan Cullen's advice and form a strategic alliance. The Harper Conservatives will -- you'll excuse the pun -- turn blue. But they will not be able to claim that the opposition is a "separatist coalition."

In the end, it will take such a coalition to stop the Conservative juggernaut.

To influence U.S. opinion, both at the level of legislators and the
general public, Canadian companies poured untold millions into the fray.
They papered Washington with lobbyists, including someone who was once
high up in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the
Democratic nomination and two former U.S. ambassadors to Canada. The
Harper government put Canada’s entire diplomatic apparatus in the U.S.
behind the Keystone campaign. The Prime Minister himself went to the
U.S. and declared approval of Keystone a “no-brainer.”

Sierra Club of Canada Executive Director John Bennett accused the
government of engaging in an unprecedented effort to damage the
credibility of the “mainstream” environmental movement.

Of the Northern Gateway hearings,
Bennett said, “People are just exercising their democratic right to be
heard on an issue that will impact all Canadians, present and future.
The purpose of an environmental assessment is to ask tough questions and
hear the answers. Why does Mr. Oliver so strongly object to this? Do we
no longer live in a democracy? Do our citizens no longer have the right
to ask tough questions and express their opinions?”

Bob Rae argues that the government's tactics are tantamount to interfering in a law case. But, as the recent passage of the bill to abolish the Canadian Wheat Board proves, the Harperites believe that the law is an ass -- unless they make the law. Oil is this government's lifeblood.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

"The Upper House remains a dumping ground for the favoured cronies of the prime minister," a righteous Stephen Harper proclaimed back in 2004. As is always the case with this prime minister, it is instructive to compare his past statements with his present practice.

wisely opted not to run in the 2008 election after voting with Harper
and against his province on the Atlantic accord. The Senate appointment
is his reward for voting against the clear wishes of the people who
elected him, which is exactly the sort of thing that used to send smoke
pouring out of the ears of the Reformers who pushed so hard for an
elected Senate.

The same pattern applies to most of the other new arrivals:

CFLer David Braley, who donated $46,500 to that long-ago leadership
campaign, and tens of thousands more to other Conservative candidates.

Leo Housakos, a key Quebec organizer who learned the ropes fundraising in Montreal at the provincial and municipal level.

Former
CFLer Larry Smith, who ran unsuccessfully in Quebec, and complained
when he was appointed that he was taking a "dramatic, catastrophic" pay
cut.

Patrick Brazeau, the only prominent aboriginal
leader to support Harper, who wanted to keep picking up his paycheque as
a leader while sitting in the Senate.

He appointed
campaign manager Doug Finley, fundraiser Irving Gerstein and spinner
Carolyn Stewart Olsen, where they can help him behind the scenes while
we pay their salaries.

So much for Senate reform. But then again, "reform" for Stephen Harper has always meant marching backward.

Monday, January 09, 2012

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about reforming Canada's democratic institutions -- electing the Senate, moving to proportional representation, and cleaning up Question Period. Changing all that machinery might make things better. But, as Robert Asselin points out, none of those changes carries a guarantee:

We could do all this. And probably solve some of our problems at the margin.
But it won’t make our politics better.
It won’t produce statesmanship.
It won’t empower us as fellow citizens.
As such, these institutional reforms won’t bring more civility and substance into the public discourse.

For none of those reforms solve our real problem -- which is civic apathy. What Canada desperately needs is an engaged citizenry. Asselin continues:

In a recent iPolitics column, Allison Loat, who leads the wonderful
initiative called Samara, wrote that “Canada needs to cultivate more
political citizens”. I think it captures the essence of our challenge.
We can’t afford to see politics as something that belongs to a few
insiders. We can protest – and we certainly should when it is needed –
but what about occupying the vehicles that can make change happen,
namely the political parties? We can also create new ones if you we
don’t like the ones we have.

Some of us, myself included, have wondered when Stephen Harper will reach the tipping point -- when the citizens of this country will rise up and say with one voice, "we have had enough." They did it with Brian Mulroney. They did it with Chretien and Martin. But, so far, they have grumbled and remained passive during what Lawrence Martin has called a "year of moral bankruptcy."

As long as we are willing to take it, Stephen Harper will be more than willing to dish it out. Canada needs citizens who have a passion for politics -- people, for instance, like Norman Bethune.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

In his song,The Boxer, Paul Simon sang, "A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest." Frank Bruni points out, in this morning's New York Times, that this human frailty is particularly true of the Bushes -- father and son -- and the place they hold in the present Republican narrative: In the case of Bush the Younger, Bruni writes that:

They seldom mention Bush positively. They seldom mention Bush
negatively. They also never mention the Bush before Bush — the other
slice of bread in the Clinton sandwich — and have thus turned the father
and the son almost wholly into ghosts.

You’d think Ronald Reagan, who is invoked incessantly, was the last
Republican president, and you’d think he was not only a flawless chief
executive but a sinless adherent to current Republican dogma.

The eight years when the last Republican president occupied the White House have gone down the memory hole. That loss of memory is quite purposeful:

[The] debt has indeed risen at a terrifying pace over the last three
years, but for reasons that have a great deal to do with ... George W.
Bush. The perpetuation of his tax cuts, the continuation of his new prescription drug benefit, the management of his wars and the interest payments on debt that he
accumulated account for a crucial share of the additional sum Obama has
amassed. And while the details of Obama’s stimulus spending and
bailouts can and should be seriously questioned, the need for action
stemmed largely from a severe economic downturn that began under 43.

Even more interesting is how Bush the Elder has been air brushed from the Republican pitch. His fiscal record is the exact opposite of his son's:

FOR real, brave fiscal responsibility, Republicans should refer to and
lionize the 41st president, the other George Bush. Much of his record,
including his decision to exit Iraq after removing Saddam Hussein from
Kuwait, shimmers in retrospect.

At great political cost, he allowed a tax increase appropriate to the
fiscal circumstances. More than a few economists believe that it set the
stage for the boom of the Clinton years. But 41’s budgetary approach is
less likely to draw attention from present-day Republicans than 43’s.
It runs counter to the party’s anti-tax obsessions. It’s anathema.

Instead, to the uninformed it appears that the last Republican president was Ronald Reagan. But, even in his case, Republican memory is highly selective:

As one prominent party strategist laughingly reminded me this week,
Reagan allowed a dozen tax increases by some counts and measures; put
Sandra Day O’Connor, an eventual disappointment to conservatives, on the
Supreme Court; and signed the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform act,
which gave amnesty to three million illegal immigrants. The liberal in Obama must be green with envy.

The truth is that neither the Bushes nor Reagan fit the present narrative. Republicans are cherry picking evidence to fit their thesis. It may work as an advertising ploy. But it's disconnected from reality and the truth.

Saturday, January 07, 2012

After the last election, Peter C. Newman wrote an obituary for the Liberal Party. Some of us thought it was premature -- if only because a week is a long time in politics. The coming Liberal convention will allow us to have a peek inside what Stephen Clarkson once called "The Big Red Machine" to determine how much life is still in the party.

We still need to develop a new, coherent policy proposal for Canadians
that is very different from the one we have put forward in the past. We
still need to decide what our new voter coalition looks like. We still
need a new leader who’s economically literate, has a clear plan for the
party and the country and can dedicate 15 years to the job. In other
words, while small progress has been made since May, most of the really
tough decisions and trade offs remain. None of that was ever going to
happen at this biennial.

The one thing that Liberals have in their favour is time. Unfortunately, Stephen Harper can -- and will -- do a lot of damage during that time. But for the first time in a long time, the Liberals do not have to prepare for an election. If they are wise, they will use their convention to lay out an action plan which will accomplish what Silver says needs to be done. There is still a long ways to go.

Friday, January 06, 2012

We need (another) overhaul of the tax system, to remove boutique
credits that add complexity at the expense of fairness; and to close
loopholes that allow the wealthy to shirk their responsibility. We need
to bolster public pensions, get serious about energy conservation and
strategy, and get creative about health care.

Instead, we get more commentary on the horse race, who stuck it to whom, and more voter apathy. Stephen Harper flourishes in such an environment. He came to Ottawa to stick it to a lot of people. And he has ideas:

There are rumours the Conservatives will move the retirement age to 67,
for example; there is a good chance Canada will involve itself in a war
against Iran, or Syria. These are not, necessarily, good ideas but they
are more worthy of contemplation than, say, Senate reform.

If those ideas are adopted, the consequences are clear. It is no accident that income inequality is now rising faster in Canada than in the United States. But the NDP is focused, as it should be, on picking a new leader. And the media are focused on whether or not Bob Rae will stay on as permanent Liberal leader.

The Liberals got lost in the weeds of personal ambition and forgot the people they were supposed to represent.One hopes that the NDP will not make the same mistake. The only way to gain public support is to develop a program that people will buy.

If the Liberals are smart when they meet next week, they will focus on ideas -- not Bob Rae.

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Back in October, when 6,800 Air Canada workers rejected a second offer from Air Canada, the Harper government intervened immediately, claiming that the strike endangered the Canadian economy. Air Canada is a private corporation. But the Conservatives claimed that, because transportation fell under federal jurisdiction, they had to intervene.

When 420 workers at Electro-Motive Canada were locked out by their employer five days ago -- and were told to take or leave a 55% pay cut -- the Harper government remained silent. Such was not the case in 2008, when Stephen Harper appeared at the plant to announce $5 million in tax breaks to locomotive buyers and another $1 million in tax breaks for capital investment in the company.

Electro-Motive is a private company also involved in transportation. But it's owned by Caterpillar. And therein lies the difference. During the last election, Mr. Harper claimed that he was working for Canadians. The Electro-Motive strike and the Air Canada strike prove that Harper is working for the man -- or men -- who, according to Hugh Mackenzie's report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, earned as much in the first three days of this year as the average Canadian earns in a year.

And he sees nothing wrong with the workers at Electro-Motive earning 55% less this year. Behold the Prime Minister of Canada.

Sons struggling to live up to fathers. Sons striving to outdo fathers.
Sons scheming to avenge fathers. Sons burning to one-up fathers. Sons
yearning to impress fathers who vanished early on. Sons leaning on
fathers. Sons using fathers as reverse-play books.

Mitt Romney appears to be haunted by the ghost of his father -- a good man who made the mistake of admitting that he had been "brainwashed" by propaganda on Vietnam. Whatever the younger Romney's faults, being brainwashed does not appear to be one of them. His real problem seems to be adhering to the party line.

Then there is the case of George H.W. and George W. The jury is still out on their legacies. But historians will surely note that both men had their own Iraq Wars. There is also the case of Al Gore Sr. and Al Gore Jr. Both Gores rose to become senators from Tennessee. But Junior almost became president, winning the popular vote but losing in the electoral college.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did not have to deal with political fathers -- however, they both lost their fathers early; and both had to adjust to stepfathers.

These days, political ambition seems to run in the family -- like father like son. Dowd writes:

Even though Mitt is far more conservative these days than his moderate
dad, he loves talking about his parents on the trail, recounting the
time they took him in the Rambler for a cross-country drive to see
monuments. He has called his dad “the real deal” and the definition of
“a successful human” and explained his political ambition as “a family
gene.”

It's undeniable that some fathers cast long shadows. Whether -- in the case of political candidates -- that's good or bad is surely a legitimate topic for debate.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Kelly McParland recently nominated the Occupy Movement for The National Post's"brain half full award." He scornfully described the movement as:

People lying around in tents in downtown parks because somehow that will
combat “corporate greed”, or solve one of the two dozen other
complaints they had, which essentially boiled down to: “I want the world
to be different, but I don’t want to have to put out any effort myself,
other than hanging out in this tent.” In the U.S. there was real reason
for protest; in Canada it was mainly, “Hey, look what they’re doing in
New York. I wanna do that too.”

But reports this morning inThe Globe and Mailand The Toronto Star suggest that the Post's collective brain is half full. Consider the position of Canada's top 100 CEO's:

The 100 highest paid chief executives whose companies are listed on the
S&P/TSX composite index made an average of $8.38-million in 2010,
according to figures pulled from circulars by the Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives, a left-leaning think-tank.

During the same period:

Regular Canadians, on the other hand, have seen their wages stagnate
over the past few years. In 2010, after adjusting for inflation, average
wages actually fell.

Put another way, on this -- the third day of the year -- the average Canadian CEO has made more money than the average Canadian will make all year. Hugh Mackenzie, the author of the report, says that Canada's business elite and the rest of Canadians are living on two different planets:

“The people at the very top of the income scale — and CEOs are at the
top of the top — have really launched themselves into a kind of economic
interplanetary travel. If the rest of us are on earth, they're off
somewhere else in a different world. I think that's unstable.

And Stephen Harper says that cutting corporate taxes will create more jobs, while .E.I. contributions should be raised. Something's wrong with this picture. Those folks in the tents know what's going on.

Monday, January 02, 2012

No doubt the folks at the Heritage Foundation will pillory Paul Krugman for his column in this morning's New York Times. Their disrespect for him matches his own disrespect for them. On the subject of the national debt, Krugman writes:

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress
relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects
of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the
likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President
Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring.
Any day now!

And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical
lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their
choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know
anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

The problem, Krugman claims, is that right wing ideologues have chosen the wrong analogy. They claim that the U.S. government is like a family who has taken out too big a mortgage. But that's simply not the case, for two reasons:

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all
they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax
base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became
increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income
subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an
over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a
large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

Of course, Krugman's critics will say that's absurd. America is on the hook to China. But, according to Krugman:

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States,
including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of
foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims
on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments
into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more
from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image
is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been
misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Krugman repeats the argument he has been making for a long time. Politicians should be focusing on unemployment. When people go to work, tax revenues go up -- and deficits go down. But that won't happen until those in charge get their analogies right.

Sunday, January 01, 2012

When the Harper government was found in contempt of parliament, the prime minister defined the problem as a not having enough votes. It was, he said, "simply a case of the other three parties outvoting us." With a majority, he now argues, there can be no such thing as contempt.

But, in Friday's Globe and Mail, Peter Russell asks a seminal question about how we are governed: "Does it matter if our laws are passed illegally?" The question arose after the government decided to ignore a federal court decision which held that Bill C-18 -- the bill to abolish the Canadian Wheat Board -- was illegal. The Harper government simply decided that it could ignore all legal precedents and kill the Wheat Board.

The government has defended its action constitutionally under the banner
of parliamentary sovereignty. But against this position is the view
that Parliament can bind itself as to the “manner and form” of future
legislation, a view supported by many constitutional scholars in Canada
and other Westminster parliamentary democracies. Taking this view does
not mean that Parliament can never change its mind and rescind
legislation passed by previous Parliaments. But if it is going to depart
from a process of law-making that an earlier Parliament committed to,
it must do so explicitly and repeal the legislation.

The government took the position that, with its new majority, it can do what it wants. It has no responsibility to honour promises made by previous governments. By that logic, it has no obligation to honour previous promises about the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security or Medicare. A majority government only requires approval in a general election. All other checks and balances then become null and void.

Russell warns his readers that:

Canadians should understand that at stake here is not just a technical
point of law, but the integrity of parliamentary government. In placing
Section 47 in the Wheat Board Act, Canada’s 36th Parliament
made a commitment to grain growers that it would not consider changing
the rules for marketing their crops without their consent. To hold that
such a promise means nothing once another party has a majority in the
House of Commons is to deny Parliament the capacity to make such
commitments to citizens whose interests are so directly affected by
legislation.

It should be obvious by now that the Harper government stands for contempt -- contempt for parliament, contempt for the courts, contempt for the press and, ultimately, contempt for citizens. When those citizens gave Mr. Harper his majority, they did not give him carte blanche do do as he wishes.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.